biography literature

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Revised Ed., 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 428 pages. While most readers know her only from her beloved classic Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys, her journey to become one of American's best known authors was full of twists and turns. Daughter of a prominent educator, her early life was filled with encounters with such notables and Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other prominent intellectuals of the day. But her rise to literary fame marred by poverty and war, and hindered by her unconventional ideas about slavery, women's rights and politics. Author Martha Saxton shows how her transendentalist father, activist mother, and three sisters not only influenced her world view, but became the basis for stories of the March family, beloved the world over. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 400 pages. In 1897 Tolstoy wrote his daughter Tonya, explaining his opposition to her desired marriage: "As far as love is concerned, it's an ignoble and unhealthy sentiment-I would not have opened my door to it." Perhaps this passage reflects the turbulent marriage of Leo and Sonya-first the promise of love and then disillusionment. Certainly, there was a love of sorts-their marriage lasted 48 years and brought forth 13 children-but the later half of the marriage was soured by acrimony, secrecy, and great emotional wounding. The greatest division came with the battle over the rights to Tolstoy's works. Sonya finally got sole possession, outliving Leo by nine years and plagued by the thought that she had been wrong for her genius husband. In intimate and scrupulous detail often drawn directly from Leo and Sonya's diaries, Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) has profiled the disintegration of a marriage. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 497 pages. "The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost's poems . . . Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost's peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost's personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man." -Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Blue Rider Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 336 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white illustrations and pictures throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 422 pages. Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians -- along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the 'art of losing' that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem 'One Art' --perhaps her most famous-- was linked in equal part to an 'art of finding,' Like new.

Hardcover. NY, Random House;, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages. Kurt Vonnegut's eldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty, aged box. Inside, she discovered an unexpected treasure: more than two hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship.The letters begin in 1941, after the former schoolmates reunited at age nineteen, sparked a passionate summer romance, and promised to keep in touch when they headed off to their respective colleges. And they did, through Jane's conscientious studying and Kurt's struggle to pass chemistry. The letters continue after Kurt dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1943, while Jane in turn graduated and worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. They also detail Kurt's deployment to Europe in 1944, where he was taken prisoner of war and declared missing in action, and his eventual safe return home and the couple's marriage in 1945.

Hardcover. NY, Biblioasis, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 290 pages. Bruce Jay Friedman has done it all, charming the glitziest industries of American golden-age culture for more than half a century. Lucky Bruce is his long-awaited memoir, and it's everything we'd expect and more: here is Friedman at his best, waltzing from Madison Avenue to Hollywood and back again, and reilluminating with brilliant clarity the dazzle of post-war American life. Cameos by Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Mario Puzo, Lillian Hellman, Warren Beatty, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Grazer, Candida Donadio, Crazy Joe Gallo, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Richardson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and the irreplaceable Elaine. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jaket, 182 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 2nd pr., 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright unclipped dust jacket. Explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. His most poignant and evocative writing emerged in his sympathy for the Okies fleeing the dust storms of the Midwest, the migrant workers toiling in California's fields and the labourers on Cannery Row, reflecting a social engagement-paradoxical for all of his natural misanthropy-radically different from the writers of the so-called Lost Generation. 446 pages, remainder dot on top edge otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 330 pages, b&w illustrations. Paris in the 1920s was bursting with talent in the worlds of art, design and literature. The city was at the forefront of everything new and exciting; there was no censorship; life and love were there for the taking. At its center was the gorgeous, seductive English socialite Nancy Cunard, scion of the famous shipping line. Her lovers were legion, but this book focuses on five of the most significant and a lifelong friendship. Her affairs with acclaimed writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Louis Aragon were passionate and tempestuous, as was her romance with black jazz pianist Henry Crowder. Her friendship with the famous Irish novelist George Moore, her mother's lover and a man falsely rumored to be Nancy's father, was the longest-lasting of her life. Cunard's early years were ones of great wealth but also emotional deprivation. Her mother Lady Cunard, the American heiress Maud Alice Burke (who later changed her name to Emerald) became a reigning London hostess; Nancy, from an early age, was given to promiscuity and heavy drinking and preferred a life in the arts to one in the social sphere into which she had been born. Highly intelligent, a gifted poet and widely read, she founded a small press that published Samuel Beckett among others. A muse to many, she was also a courageous crusader against racism and fascism. She left Paris in 1933, at the end of its most glittering years and remained unafraid to live life on the edge until her death in 1965. Remainder dot top edge otherwise clean.

Softcover. Wilkes-Barre PA, Etruscan Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 304 pages. This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 352 pages. Translated by Sam Taylor. As a bilingual bestselling novelist with a mixed Franco-British bloodline and a host of eminent forebears, Tatiana de Rosnay is the perfect candidate to write a biography of Daphne du Maurier. As an eleven-year-old de Rosnay read and reread Rebecca, becoming a lifelong devotee of Du Maurier's fiction. Now de Rosnay pays homage to the writer who influenced her so deeply, following Du Maurier from a shy seven-year-old, a rebellious sixteen-year-old, a twenty-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old lady. With a rhythm and intimacy to its prose characteristic of all de Rosnay's works, Manderley Forever is a vividly compelling portrait and celebration of an intriguing, hugely popular and (at the time) critically underrated writer.

Hardcover. New York, Citadel Press, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 296 pages, b&w photographs. Edgewear, rubbing to price-clipped dust jacket; in brodart. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 537 pages. Slight edgewear, rubbing to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, First Edition, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 249 pages. Hardcover. Grey cloth covered boards with white titles to spine. Dust jacket with light, marginal wear, now protected with a plastic sleeve. Black & white illustrations, tight binding, clean & unmarked pages throughout.

Softcover. Merrick NY, Cross-Cultural Communications, 1st pbk, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 48 pages. Edited and translated from the Italian by Stanislao G. Pugliese. Ignazio Silone, anti-fascist and founding member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) offers a politically conscious and soul searching memoir which details his own PSI activities and the various factors engendering the "necessity for action on behalf of liberty and democracy among the working classes." Over the course of his political career, Silone wrote a number of fiction and non-fiction works, and was imprisoned in Italy, France, Spain, and finally in Switzerland where he composed this memoir in 1942. Often compared with Andre Malraux and Albert Camus, Silone was awarded an honorary degree by Yale University, was a recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. INSCRIBED BY PUGLIESE on the title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1st, 1854, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 385 pages. Embossed brown cloth covers w/ gilt lettering. Chips from top and bottom of spine. Rubbing to cover corners. Previous owner's signature inside front cover. Else a nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 430 pages. James Olney, one of the most distinguished scholars of autobiography, tells the story of an evolving literary form that originated in the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, underwent profound changes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life-writing trilogy, and found a momentary conclusion in the work of Samuel Beckett.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Panjandrum/Aris Books, 1st, April 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 251 pages plus index, b&w photographs. Light edge wear, rubbing to dust jacket. Else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 530 pages. Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Clean, bright copy, as new.

Hardcover. NY, Brewer & Warren, 1st US, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, marbled boards with green cloth spine, 494 pages. A scholarly biography of the great French dramatist, b&w illustrations. Light shelf wear. Top of spine has some fading/sunning, no markings.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a price-clipped dust jacket with light wear, 408 pages. The circumstances surrounding Montaigne's writings are described in a review of his life and important personal relationships. Gutter crack after front fly leaf. A sound, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st US, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 266 pages. Stanislaus Joyce was more than his brother's keeper. He was at various times his brother's co-dependent, touchstone, conscience, and biggest fan. The two shared the same genius, the same childhood influences, and had the same literary instinct, but in Stanislaus it was channeled into sober academic pursuit, while in James it evolved into gaiety, wild whimsy, and at times sodden despair. Covering the first twenty-two years of James Joyce's life in Dublin and Trieste, My Brother's Keeper is a window onto the drama that was his youth. Thanks to Stanislaus's superb memory and sure hand, here we find the Dublin of the streets, neighbors, churches, and unforgettable eccentrics.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 336 pages. This single-volume selection of the letters of Margaret Fuller affords a unique opportunity for renewed acquaintance with a great American thinker of the Transcendentalist circle. The letters represent Fuller at all stages of her life and career, and show her engaged as literary critic, as translator and as champion of German literature and thought, as teacher, as travel writer, as literary editor, as journalist, as feminist, as revolutionary, as wife and mother. My Heart Is a Large Kingdom, unlike previous collections, includes only letters transcribed from Fuller's manuscripts and does not reproduce correspondence known only from printed sources and copies in hands other than Fuller's. Among the recipients of the letters in this generous selection are such literary and cultural figures as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (Fuller's husband), George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. Taken together, the letters serve as a chronicle of Fuller's lifetime and provide glimpses into her thoughts and feelings during the years of the "Conversations," Dial, and the revolution in Rome. Clean copy.